Chris Beckett science fiction collection wins literary prize
Agency client Chris Beckett’s Elastic Press short fiction collection The Turing Test has won the prestigious 2009 Edge Hill Short Story Prize, beating collections published by Faber, Vintage, Cape and Hamish Hamilton.
From the announcement on the Bookseller website:
Judge James Walton, journalist and chair of BBC Radio 4’s “The Write Stuff” said: “I suspect Chris Beckett winning the Edge Hill Prize will be seen as a surprise in the world of books. In fact, though, it was also a bit of surprise to the judges, none of whom knew they were science fiction fans beforehand.”Yet, once the judging process started, it soon became clear that The Turing Test was the book that we’d all been impressed by, and enjoyed, the most — and one by one we admitted it.”
As you can imagine, I’m delighted that Chris should win a major literary prize — and that an SF collection should do so!